Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
I'm not sure what you mean by this. My point is that altruism between humans owes some or much of its existence to the fact that we live in an environment that we are not adapted to. That means that even though our genes want to help starving people in far away countries, they are "motivated" to do so by selfishness.
Selfless, altruistic strategies may exist, but they're not here because they are adaptive and promoted through natural selection. As you say, every individual reproducing can be detrimental to a population because it exhausts resource - and this is exactly how populations behave. Those who can reproduce do so and population growth can spiral out of control, exhausting resources, causing populations to starve, crash and perhaps even go extinct. This is how organisms generally behave.
I'm sorry if I'm arguing against a strawman.
I don't really understand the bigger picture you're presenting here and so am unsure of how to respond to it. But in general terms, if your genes only exist to promote those other genes in the library, then they will go extinct. Hence, all genes have to work for their own survival. Hence, genes are selfish.
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I think we agree here honestly, and the differences are semantic. You are talking about genes actually being selfish, but I am saying that psychologically, the urge is selfless (no personal gain is perceived by the organism even though they have a genetic incentive for altruism).
And that this altruism that evolved in a tribal setting (where, genetically, it was not altruism proper, in your terminology) translated to a farther reaching altruism in post-agriculture societies and now serves as a selection process itself that selects more on ideology than fitness. This meme (altruism/equality/socialism) is in competition with more competitive models (like capitalism and social darwinism) and both ideologies heavily influence who lives and dies before reproducing (and this influence selection) And exist at different levels in our social structures (from politicians to riff raff). I have to concede that it could end up just a noise term, but I feel like genocide and nation wars would have a strong effect on which gene lines remain.
It would be awesome to time jump 50,000 years ahead and see how humans evolve in such an artificially self-constructed environment (If it's even sustainable; iirc we follow the same population/extinction curve as other mammals leading some to speculate, based on population dynamics, that our time may be coming soon, as we appear to be reaching the peak).